Music Criticism and Compositional Practice 117opinion to light. Following the debate in Anbruch, which had led to the
two controversial articles about the issues raised in ‘Reaction and
Progress’, these views were aired in a radio discussion which was then
printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung in December 1930. Adorno used the
occasion to restate his ideas about progress in music. According to him,
progressive modern music manifested itself historically in the musical
material. The task of the composer was to grapple with the material and
transform it from an inward phenomenon to one visible to the outside
world. ‘If talk about the struggles of the great artist are to amount to
anything more than the trite glorification of genius, it can only refer to
this interaction between the artist and his material. Only from such
interaction has it ever been possible to generate musical coherence.’^27
A different aspect of their dialogue was concerned with the social
nature of music. Adorno insisted that the sociological elements of music
could only be discovered in the musical material; the material was
the sphere in which a historically changing reality became concretely
embedded. It followed that a sociologically based music analysis must
focus on analysing particular works. For its part, the interpretation
of works had the task of extracting the social meaning of music from
the material. Adorno’s statements make it clear that focusing on the
interpretation of particular works by no means excludes our historical
experience of given social relations. As in his sketch on ‘Stabilized Music’,
he did not hide his view of ‘the present relations of domination’
in capitalist society which ‘simply do not allow art to have a socially
authoritative function, particularly any art that has a truth-content.’^28
This specifically sociological approach to music was to move gradually
to the centre of Adorno’s attention.
In this radio discussion Adorno focused on the concept of musical
material. However, the correspondence with Krenek which started up
in 1929 was triggered substantially by problems of atonality and twelve-
tone technique. From the very outset, in April 1929, he emphasized that
the compelling need for atonal compositions did not require a com-
poser to make a subjective decision, but was the consequence of the
musical material ‘once it is no longer preformed and I may no longer
take its preformed state for granted without falsifying what the material
demands from me.’^29 And for the radically free composer the material
does not call exclusively for twelve-tone music. Twelve-tone technique
is no authoritative canon for composition; it is ‘not a new shelter in
which one can take refuge now that the roof has fallen in on tonality.’
He went on to explain: ‘I do not regard twelve-tone technique as the
only possible form of atonality, but believe that it is possible to make
meaningful music independently of any such commitment, and I hope
to be able to prove this myself in the not all-too distant future.’^30
Five years later, Adorno once again had occasion to comment in a
letter on twelve-tone technique. Although he made use of it himself
when composing, he had reservations about it, particularly if it became